Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
Interpretation
Empathy for others increases when we can easily envision their experiences and challenges.
This quote by Steven Pinker emphasizes the importance of empathy and moral consideration in human interactions. It suggests that when we can visualize what it is like to be in someone else's position, our understanding and compassion for their situation grows, prompting us to treat them with greater kindness and fairness. This ability to 'trade places' in imagination fosters a deeper connection and commitment to the well-being of others.
In practice
This quote could be used in speeches about social justice to encourage empathy.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
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